Nigel Kershaw - Online Producer Deep Silver Dambuster

In this week's lecture, Nigel Kershaw, a veteran who has been in the industry since 1989 and is currently working on the next Homefront instalment. His talk covered a game designer's role and a deeper look at what fun and play means in video games.

My report this week will cover his comments on game design documentation and why it is coming under fire with modern development.

Death To The GDD

A design document is supposed to hold the vision for the game you want to create, determined very early in development and used as a bible for each of the disciplines involved. But with modern games ever increasing in complexity, it is becoming difficult to write about a game that doesn't exist and expect it to be done exactly as needed.

A Jagex employee wrote an article (Sweatman, 2014) on why he wouldn't choose to create design documents with traditional methods anymore and offers alternative methods to going around it. I find myself agreeing with his points on why they don't work, with the documentation assuming too much and being too rigid. Judging by his alternatives, I think we have the same idea as to what they should be - fluid and dynamic.

In a panel at Eurogamer Expo (Welsh, 2010), Hello Games spoke about how design documentation was "an insane idea" adding on a brilliant comment:

"It's like sitting down to write a recipe and never actually cooking something."

In conclusion, my previous thoughts on the GDD are shared among industry veterans. In an industry such as gaming, it is really difficult to create something when you follow something as rigid as a pre-determined document throughout the whole process of development. But there are methods around this that I have personally used myself (i.e. a collaborative effort on Google Docs).

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References:

Sweatman, James. (2014) Death of the game design document [Online]. Available from: <http://www.develop-online.net/opinions/death-of-the-game-design-document/0195381> [Accessed 25 April 2015].

Welsh, Oli. (2010) Hallo Games: design docs are "insane" [Online]. Available from: <http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-10-02-hello-games-design-docs-are-insane> [Accessed 25 April 2015].